22 Oct 2014
Today’s guest post is from Fiona Ward:
“About 18 months ago, I invited the women of the Transition Network staff and board to an evening meeting to begin to explore our experience of working in the Transition movement. We discovered that our reasons for wanting to get together and our perspectives on gender were many and various. But some common themes emerged and we agreed to explore them.
To best do this, we felt it was important that we had a space to talk freely and openly with other women (and this need is understood and supported by the men in our organisation). We have been meeting every 2-3 months or so since then, and it’s a wonderful mix of a lot of great food, fascinating stimulating conversation and a strong sense of mutual support, connection and understanding. We don’t have a set agenda and we don’t aim to produce/do things per se, though usually someone will facilitate a discussion that naturally emerges from the opening check-in. Our group is called Women in Transition (WiT).
We wanted to share with you some of the useful things that have emerged so far, and really welcome your comments and reflections.
My experience
I initiated this group due to a growing interest in gender issues, both within myself and in the world I operate in. Personally, I have been seeing more clearly how my upbringing and wider societal values has led to some over development of my masculine traits, and a disregard for some of the more feminine ones. While I appreciate and value my academic capacity, and ability to get things done which certainly helps in my leadership roles, I am understanding more about how this contributes to a sense of imbalance in both my work life and my personal one.
I am also more aware of, and interested in, my unconscious role in perpetuating gender stereotypes and how I bring that into my work. And when I see others doing it, how can I better articulate the issue and challenge it skilfully? For example, I have been raising the issue of gender in our REconomy national hubs group.
All of the 5 hubs in this initial REconomy group are represented by men, and I am the only woman. When I have tried to discuss this with the group, somewhat tentatively, I have felt the responses reflected a belief that gender isn’t an issue in this case, it’s coincidental that the lead/strategic role is filled by a man and there’s no need for further discussion or curiosity about the issue and our respective experiences.
Now I don’t know anything about the specific gender issues in each of these very different European cultures (Belgium, Croatia, Italy, Netherlands & Latvia) and I’d be interested to hear more from the women involved in the national movements – is this also their experience, that it’s not an issue?
Regardless, my hope is that this post will help me better articulate the issues in future conversations, stimulate a curiosity around our various perspectives and experiences and provide a framing for a more satisfying exchange of views.
Voices
One of the starting points for our WiT group discussion was a desire that a balance of both women’s and men’s voices should be heard speaking publicly for and about the Transition movement. We wanted to understand better what stops many women from taking up leadership/figurehead positions even though they are heavily engaged in the work. How might we support women to develop the confidence and skills they need to volunteer for these roles? And how can we be alert to, and address, the unconscious bias that can prevent women from being chosen as public speakers and representatives of our organisations?
However, as we talked we identified a deeper level of enquiry which felt a little more elusive but just as important (perhaps more important) to the health of groups within the Transition movement.
Values
We discussed the value we place on different qualities, skills, activities and roles and how that influences the way we work together. We know that our culture tends to attach a lesser value to attributes and behaviours which are aligned to the feminine, than to attributes and behaviours which are traditionally viewed as masculine.
The higher value attached to ‘masculine’ roles, skills and activities shows itself in many ways – through the status and authority accorded to certain roles, through the extent to which we notice, acknowledge and appreciate particular skills or behaviour, through wages, through the time and resources we allocate to particular activities. And this unconscious process of attaching a value can happen at many levels – within each of us as individuals (which parts of my personality dominates and which parts do I tend to override?), within groups and within society.
We’ve started to compile a table which pairs ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ roles, activities, skills and behaviours. At the moment, it looks like this:
| Feminine |
Masculine |
| Facilitators |
Key note speakers |
| Co-ordinators/Support role |
Leaders/Spokespeople |
| Wisdom |
Knowledge |
| Listening |
Talking |
| Process |
Content |
| Being |
Doing |
| Building and maintaining relationships |
Getting tasks done |
| Expressing emotions (and intuition) |
Thinking and doing |
Of course, both men and women have the capacity to inhabit all of these roles and display any and all of the behaviours listed. Indeed, the cultures within which most of us grew up tended to emphasise the masculine and inhibit the development of our feminine qualities – and as I mentioned earlier this has certainly had consequences in my own life especially around my drive for doing rather than being (explained beautifully in a blog by Sophy Banks), and a reluctance to bring emotions into the work place (or in fact, some other areas of my life).
For me, this has led to me being unable to see some of the feminine qualities in myself and others, and sadly often a dismissal of them. In my role with the REconomy Project – and in my life in general – I am keen to redress this, and where I can bring influence, to help ensure that teams and groups are balanced. It feels especially important that the area of business and economics reflects a more equal valuing of the feminine and the masculine.
Change
We believe that for individuals, groups and communities to thrive, particularly in times of change, uncertainty and fear, we need to develop and maintain a dynamic balance between content and process, between acting and reflecting, between talking and listening, between the feminine and the masculine.
We see the need for us to be clear, open and positive about the value that we attach to both the feminine and the masculine within our organisations. We know this will require us to be alert to the ways that our language and decisions can so easily overlook or minimise the contribution made by the feminine.
Transition is all about envisioning and then working to create a different way of living. If we don’t ensure these new systems are balanced from the outset, then we are simply re-creating some fundamental flaws of the current paradigm that are not only massively unjust – excluding the full participation of women – but which ensure everyone suffers from a society bereft of the more feminine qualities including connection, love and nurture.
This may not be easy for any of us given the assumptions, values and habits we have picked up from the dominant culture within which we live. It can feel difficult to raise these issues, when the group leans more towards the masculine side. Women often report feeling unheard or side-lined when they raise these sensitive topics and challenge the status-quo, even in our own movement and organisation.
Interestingly, going back to the imbalance of the REconomy national hubs group, we have 5 new hubs joining the group and 4 of these will be led by a woman. While it balances the group overall, it raises more interesting questions about the practical implementation of balance – ideally would we want leadership shared by a man and woman in each hub? Or a commitment from the leader, regardless of their gender, to equally value and integrate all qualities, along with an attempt to ensure the wider team has balance overall?
Impacts
We notice that one of the outcomes of our WiT meetings has been more of a sense of shared responsibility to call attention to the issues, and mutual support to help ensure they are fully heard. We also notice that both women and men within our organisation are becoming more aware of gender balance of communications, and speakers at events, for example, as well as who fills which roles.
We’re keen to continue to experiment with ways of working which better integrate content and process, so that we pay attention to relationships and emotional impacts whilst taking decisive powerful action to bring about the changes we want to see in the world. And we want to share this exploration and these experiments with the wider movement, so that we can learn from each other about how to live and work together in a way which is truly satisfying and balanced.
Questions
Addressing gender imbalance overall is a massive topic and remains an enormous challenge. Hopefully this post has started to outline at least part of the issue as relevant to Transition in a way that helps us understand it, articulate it and begin to challenge things where necessary.
If you are interested in looking at this issue in your own work and organisation, here are some questions that might be useful to reflect on individually or in a group:
- In the table above, what qualities to do I/we most value in our work?
- Who typically does the public speaking? What enables them to do this?
- Whose voices are not heard? How about public communications – films, website information, posts?
- Who is in a position of leadership? What enables them to do this?
- How do women in your organisation feel about gender balance? How do the men feel?
Meanwhile our WiT group continues to meet and we will report back on what emerges. It also includes some of the women leadership from Transition Town Totnes. We’d love to hear about your experiences and your thoughts on whether gender is an issue in Transition.
Finally, we’re aware there are other highly connected issues including class, diversity, privilege and access to power that are perhaps even more strongly present in our organisation – we’re an all-white and predominantly middle-class staff and board, and we know that this demographic is extensively reflected in the wider movement. We acknowledge it’s difficult to fully separate gender as an issue, and as our organisation continues to try to find a way to address these complex intertwined issues over time, we will continue to share our thoughts and experiences with you, and ask you to share yours with us.
Authored by Fiona Ward & Sarah McAdam with input from Sophy Banks and thanks to all others for comments.
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22 Oct 2014
Chepstow is a small Welsh town with a population of about 12,000. It is a border town located on the River Wye where it flows into the Severn Estuary. Although it does have some local industries it is now mainly a commuter town with motorway access to Bristol, Newport and Cardiff. Many people will know Chepstow for it’s impressive Castle and nearby racecourse.
Chepstow is located within the administrative boundary of Monmouthshire County Council (MCC). MCC was required to produce a Local Development Plan for the county to identify suitable land to meet housing allocations as set by central government. MCC identified land within the town, presently occupied by an engineering company (Mabey). This land was identified as a result of the company wishing to relocate to an industrial estate to the south of the town, adjacent to the Severn Bridge. The company already has a presence at the site manufacturing large wind turbine towers.
The A48 road passes through the town which can become heavily congested as it is a commuter route from the Forest of Dean to Bristol and Cardiff. At one point the air pollution exceeds European safe limits. The town has a railway station and passenger numbers are growing. Recent representations by groups such as Better Trains for Chepstow (supported by Transition Chepstow) have succeeded in increasing the number of trains stopping at Chepstow.
The Mabey site, is 16 hectares in size and is located between the railway and the River Wye. The site has a rich industrial history. At the beginning of the 20th Century a cattle market was located there and an adjacent Malt House, now a listed building, was built in 1851. During the 1914-1918 war the site was chosen by the Government as one of three site for National Shipyards. The shipyard was subsequently bought by Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering specialising in bridge construction. Eventually the company became, Mabey the present owners of the land. See images below.
Several years ago, a neighbouring piece of land on the riverbank was sold for development. The site, which was also an industrial site, was cleared but no development has taken place. See below.
Transition Chepstow (TC) made representations to the MCC during the local development plan (LDP) process during 2011/2012. While TC does not see itself as a campaigning group it did express the view that the redevelopment of this potential brownfield site was preferable to greenfield sites adjacent to the town.
In our initial LDP response, we also expressed a concern that that the plan presented development in a ‘business as usual manner’. We felt it did not adequately address sustainability and resilience in the face of future climate change, peak oil and economic uncertainties. We posed several questions:
- How will the development reduce/minimise its carbon footprint and its dependence on oil?
- How will the development make use of renewable energy resources to provide power?
- How will the development deal with on site recycling facilities/composting /waste etc.?
- How will the building designs and the layout of buildings and open spaces minimise environmental impacts through effective protection of the environment and prudent management of resources? In particular The Ecological Connectivity Assessment in Monmouthshire, May 2010 Report by Gwent Ecology identified the Mabey site as having opportunities to extend habitat connectivity.
- Where is the provision of allotment land or growing space for residents to grow their own food?
- How will the need for travel be reduced?
- How will a large increase in vehicle traffic onto an already congested road system be avoided?
- How will the site be made resilient to flood events, given the threat of rising sea levels and more frequent very heavy rainfall events?
To counter the growing feeling of Chepstow becoming a dormitory town for Bristol, Newport and Cardiff, we asked to see;
- stronger and more specific proposals for developing public transport so that it provides a real, viable, alternative to the car
- development of a thriving town centre which can cater for the majority of local needs including shopping, recreation and the arts, retaining more local income and reducing reliance on the car;
- active promotion of appropriate employment opportunities. We welcomed comments regarding support for homeworking but feel more could be done to encourage this, for example a video-conferencing centre.
- a more demand-led, less formulaic, approach to affordable housing so that those who work locally can afford to live here.
The local development plan was produced and examined in public by a planning inspector where all representations were taken into account. It was subsequently adopted in February 2014. This meant that any future development within the county should be judged against the proposals set out in the plan.
This September, Mabey held a public exhibition of its proposals to redevelop their site. Mabey have some bold and encouraging aspirations for the site. They state that their vision is to create a new neighbourhood that is ‘as connected to the ecology and riverbank as it is with Chepstow itself’. Their vision is to achieve a ‘sustainable and high quality development that leaves a positive legacy for the people of Chepstow’. A significant number of Transition Chepstow members attended the exhibition and many provided individual responses to Mabey on the day.
The next stage is the submission of an outline planning application. It is hoped that a high quality Mabey plan will be the framework that will comprise the planning application. A November meeting for Transition Chepstow members has been called and it is our intention to further scrutinise the plans and make representation to further influence the development.
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21 Oct 2014
As architects and developers plan new developments, they are certainly thinking about roads, parking spaces and footprints, but are they also thinking about productive plantings, the role of rooftop gardens and biodiversity? Almost certainly not. Having visited some great urban agriculture initiatives in the last couple of years, this feels a shame for two reasons. Firstly because urban agriculture is a rapidly growing field, so by leaving it out they’re being left behind – and secondly because they are designing for a future that will very much need it. Urban agriculture is cutting edge. It’s what we need right now.
In order to weave urban agriculture, and its potential, into our discussions this month on ‘Reimagining Real Estate’, who better to talk to than André Viljoen and Katrin Bohn, architects, academics and authors of the recently published Second Nature Urban Agriculture; designing productive cities? Their first book, Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes (CPULs), published in 2004, put the idea of urban agriculture onto the agenda of the architectural profession. Things have changed a lot since then. I caught up with them by Skype a few weeks ago. As André told me, the reception when 10 years ago they first suggested to publishers a book on urban agriculture was “agriculture? We do architecture!”
The shift since CPULs came out has been remarkable. For instance, the city of Berlin has now adopted an urban strategy that wants to accommodate productive landscapes, and many of the stories of how it is spreading around the world are captured in the book (some Transition initiatives and their work around urban food production make an appearance too). The book is presented as a review of most recent research and projects as well as “a toolkit aimed at making urban agriculture happen”. It succeeds in very richly doing both.
Urban agriculture and the New Economy
One of the first things that stands out in the new book is the extent to which urban agriculture initiatives, in a similar way to Transition groups, are increasingly looking at building economic viability into what they are doing. I asked Katrin about this trend:
“Some of the examples in the book work and do make a living. Only if enterprises manage to do this is there a real future for urban food growing. That doesn’t mean that these commercially viable schemes need to be commercially viable in a profit-oriented way. They can be social enterprises. But what has been noticed in the last 10 years, what is really crucial, is that if we want to maintain the assumption that urban agriculture can change the physical appearance of cities then we need to provide concepts in which agriculture is also an economic factor. It can’t stay community gardening”.
For Katrin, the emergence of commercially viable urban agriculture projects around the world gives her, as she put it, “the right to say yes, urban agriculture has been a good idea. Because we can see that these viable versions are beginning to work”.
One of the best examples of this, which André pointed to, is Growing Communities in Hackney in London. They have built up an expanding business which involves training, urban market gardens and an evolving model for how London might better feed itself. However, André acknowledged that:
“While we can see the emergence of projects which are beginning to be economically viable they’re still very hard work and the people operating them put in a lot of effort. A lot of them have multiple income strands”.
As an example, he cited what is possibly the world’s best known rooftop farm, Brooklyn Grange Farm in New York. Their commercial viability comes not just from food production, but from taking a wider entrepreneurial approach. As he told me:
“They operated commercially in relation to the amount of food which is good, but they also rent the space out as a space for celebrations, for weddings and parties and events. That’s an important part of their income at this stage. The ones which are working purely on a commercial basis are tending to use hydroponics at the moment on rooftops. They’re lightweight, they grow food very intensively and conventionally, and I think the interesting question is whether hydroponic systems can be converted to aquaponic systems which bring us closer to closed loop systems”.
The challenges of scaling up
Another key to making urban agriculture economically viable, according to André, is its being seen as an integral part of closed loop systems using urban waste for compost and nutrition. As he put it:
“If that understanding is made then the possibility for making it commercially viable by thinking of it in relation to waste streams becomes more likely”.
But how might we scale this up? I’m intrigued to know how they think we how might most skilfully see urban agriculture more widely adopted by planners and architects as a common-place fact of life in planning new developments. Katrin told me:
“In Brighton, where we are both based, the Council have entered into their local planning requirements a small change on the website which checks when you submit planning applications not only whether they provide car parking or enough window opening surfaces or balconies, but they also check whether this new development provides space for food growing”.
For her, it could be through this kind of legislation, being pioneered in Brighton and elsewhere, that urban agriculture might best gain acceptance and a foothold. “The best way might be via these legislations so that people understand that their local council is demanding something and they have an advantage to follow it”, she told me.
The Brighton precedent arises from Food Growing and Development, a Planning Advisory Note which the Council developed in conjunction with Brighton and Hove Food Partnership. While these don’t act as a condition for getting planning permission, they do mean that if you undertake certain activities, the application will be looked at more favourably. In Brighton, André told me, “this has had a notable impact on the number of applications that include food growing spaces within them”.
This then, of course, leads to new challenges. As André put it:
“The challenge that that arises is that if you introduce food growing spaces, we know how to design them, but there is an issue of who is going to look after them and maintain them and that in some projects is still a challenge”.
Mapping the benefits of urban agriculture
One of the key ways of expanding urban agriculture is to point to the evidence base building up for its many beneficial impacts. As André told me:
“There’s a lot of work that documents the mental health benefits of access to open space, the social cohesion benefits of community food growing. The Green Thumb programme in New York which is supporting the community gardens has amassed quite a lot of evidence for social and health benefits, both physical and mental of these spaces”.
There are other benefits too. André pointed to the High Line in New York, and while featuring mostly ornamental plantings rather than edible ones, is still a huge attraction to people, which has increased property prices in the area. Prinzessinnengarten in Berlin has shown that urban agriculture is an aesthetic that tourists like, and another urban garden, Marzahn, also in Berlin, is showing how urban agriculture is increasing the attractiveness of a deprived neighbourhood.
Another benefit, and one we’ve explored here in a previous theme, is the extent to which urban agriculture (and Transition for that matter) can be seen as a public health strategy. It’s an idea André has been giving some thought:
“There’s the notion of ‘health-enabling cities’ and activities like urban agriculture fit entirely into that strand of thinking, and probably more so than activities ‘green gyms’. But there is some evidence which really it would be interesting to test. In Middlesbrough we did a project called DOT, “Design of the Times 2007”, introducing urban farming into Middlesbrough at a series of different scales.
A student of ours who surveyed residents found that in Middlesbrough people who started growing food, even if it was really token, they’d grow a couple of tomatoes or something, actually their behaviour started changing. They started purchasing food seasonally and they started eating more fresh fruit and vegetables. She compared people living in Cambridge to people living in Middlesbrough and found that in Cambridge where people already were very much engaged with health messages and were aware of environmental factors, more so than in Middlesbrough, food growing didn’t have such a big impact.
But in a place like Middlesbrough it had a huge behaviour change impact. That’s never been – as far as I’m aware – researched more rigorously. We think it probably is one of those activities that people are always seeking, behaviour change enabling activities which links directly to health improvements”.
For Katrin, it is also an easy method to convey ecological education overall:
“Whether they’re commercial or communal food growing places, many projects also engage in educational activities whether they have school groups there or whether they have particular sessions where people learn to cook or where they learn to differentiate between different lettuces”.
Urban agriculture and the architectural profession
Architecture is, like the world of fashion, prone to fads. What’s in one year is out the next, and this year’s cutting edge idea could, in 4 years, be “like so 2014”. How could that be avoided? How to make sure that urban agriculture is here to stay? Katrin acknowledged that that could be a risk:
“This danger is one reason why many protagonists in the urban food growing movement are aware that their ideas have to make this jump into policy. Sustainably influencing planning policy is really important. Architecture is fashionable and architecture follows fashion but it also follows the client’s requests. So as long as the client requests these food productive spaces then architects will engage with them”.
André added:
“We’re at that stage where we really need to get people to understand the significance of these spaces in terms of part of the city’s ecological infrastructure that they’re understood as being essential spaces, part of essential infrastructure within the city. If that mental leap is made, and we think there’s enough evidence to support it, then these spaces will become embedded in the cities. That’s really the stage we’re at, I think”.
Leading on from this, for André and Katrin, one key part of mainstreaming urban agriculture is through good research. They are part of a research project called Urban Transformations from Practice to Policy. In terms of research, André points to the work of Debra Solomon in the Netherlands, called Urbaniahoeve. They are introducing edible landscapes into a number of cities there. The focus of their work, in the run up to a conference in September 2015, will be developing tools to leverage policy change in relation to urban agriculture.
Last thoughts
Second Nature Urban Agriculture is pretty extraordinary. If we are to create built environments which are ‘locked in’ to the radically low carbon future we need to be creating, we really can’t afford to build any new developments that don’t include urban agriculture. It needs to be everywhere, and clearly at the moment that isn’t happening fast enough. Viljoen and Bohn tackle this from a range of angles, and there is something here to inspire those anywhere along a spectrum from, at one end, wondering how to grow food where they live in a city, to, at the other, planners and designers wanting to undertake ambitious scale projects. Hard to recommend it highly enough.
Who are they?
“I’m André Viloen and I’m an architect. I currently work in the University of Brighton where with Katrin Bohn we’ve been teaching a programme for Masters students and before that I was involved quite a lot with research into low-energy architecture buildings and how to make passive buildings. That’s how we came to be interested in urban agriculture”.
“I’m Katrin Bohn, who also teaches at the University of Brighton but also holds a guest professorship at the Technical University in Berlin and in both cases trying to work around that subject of food and the city. With André I also share the work in Bohn and Viljoen Architects, which now is very small and we do mainly consultancy, installation, feasability work. Again, because that subject of productive landscapes became so important for us, this is mainly what we do, and we like it”.
Why ‘Second Nature Urban Agriculture’?
(From the book): “The term ‘second nature’ has a double meaning: on the one hand it describes embedded, normalised habits and customs that take place without a thought, and on the other it refers to the manmade, cultivated space surrounding us in a similar way to (first) nature”.
The above is selected from the full interview I did with Andre and Katrin. You can hear that in full, or download it, below.
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20 Oct 2014
It would be fair, I think, to say that Transition was slower to take off in France than in some other European countries, but it now feels well underway. This evolution has been greatly aided by the recent publication, by Editions du Seuile, of the French edition of The Power of Just Doing Stuff, entitled Ils Changent Le Monde (“They Change the World” – apparently “stuff” is a tricky word to translate into French). I travelled to Paris for 2 very full days to help launch the book and give the initiatives there a boost.
The main event was a talk on the Friday evening. I was straight off Eurostar and over to the venue. It was a great evening. Natureparif, our hosts for the evening, do great work to promote biodiversity in France. Their events hall was packed, with many people having to stand around the edges.
After introductions and welcomes, I spoke for about 40 minutes about Transition, with simultaneous translation. Here is the audio of that talk:
Then people broke into pairs to ‘digest’ what they had heard. This resulted in some great questions, including:
- Surely communities having their own currencies is a form of regression rather than progress?
- Are you ever afraid sometimes? (Answer: yes of course)
- How can people make a living doing Transition?
- Can Transition function in big business?
The evening was wrapped up by short presentations from some of the French/Belgian Transition initiatives whose stories are told in the book, and then that was that. After lots of book signings and talking to people, the day drew to a close with a few Parisian beers in a gorgeous old basement.
Next morning started with a walk around the 15th Arrondissement of Paris, home to my hosts and to an active Transition initiative. Thriving commercial streets of small independent traders cheek by jowl, the kind of local economy that valuing small independent traders can create. I stocked up on cheese, which now sits next to me, gently ponging, as I make my way home by train the following day.
Our walk led us to the suburb of Pré Saint Gervais, visiting a project called Le Pouce Vert (French for ‘Green Thumb’). A former piece of unused wasteland has been converted into a community garden. Many members of Le Pré Saint Gervais en Transition had gathered there, for food and conversation.
I was shown around the garden, which combines imaginative food production and a real effort to maximise biodiversity. There are wild areas, ponds, and one of the most beautiful Insect Hotels I’ve seen.
I met lots of the members of the group, people involved in the garden, and also people from nearby Transition initiatives who had come along for the event. I was told the story about how the garden finds itself under threat from development. The Council want to build next to the garden, and to convert two-thirds of it into a more formal, traditional, un-biodiverse park. The garden group are gearing up to try and protect what they have created, to hopefully protect all or most of the garden.
We heard from people from different initiatives, including Transition Montreuil who recently launched their local currency, La Pêche, named after the peach trees grown as espalier trees against walls for which Montreuil is renowned. We were joined by the area’s Mayor who talked about their proactive work in the fields of waste and recycling, and the extent to which he is taking climate change seriously.
Finally, we were treated to a short recital of a few pieces of classical music by two local young women.
After some more book signings and farewells, a group of us headed off to the Festival du Livre et de la Presse d’Ecologie (a green literary festival). On arrival I did an interview, signed some books and then did a short presentation, a briefer version of the previous night’s talk. After questions, I signed more books, before heading out into the night.
Back at the apartment of my hosts, Corinne and Ted, a party was underway with people from the 15th Arrondissement Transition group and some from elsewhere. Good food, delicious wines, good conversation, a great icebreaker where people introduced other people to the group and much sharing of experiences and advice. A delightful end to a great couple of days.
I was up at the crack of dawn the next day heading for the Eurostar home, out through the deserted early morning streets, nagglingly unsettled by the warmth of the day (at 6am I wore just a t-shirt, in mid-October), but inspired by how quickly Transition seems to be spreading across France, and the ambition, commitment and richness of what people are doing in response to the climate crisis. The REconomy project seems to fit beautifully into peoples’ approach.
My thanks to all the wonderful people I met for their kindness and hospitality. Thanks to Christophe, Sophy and everyone at Seuil for being so wonderful to work with, all the book’s translators, Josue, to Ted and Corinne for their hospitality, to my various translators, and to the people at Natureparif.
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15 Oct 2014
One might well be forgiven for assuming that our current strategy for getting out of an economic crisis caused by an unsustainable housing bubble is to create an unsustainable housing bubble. But are we? And what is a housing bubble anyway? We asked Tony Greenham, who runs the financial reform programme at the New Economics Foundation and is also a trustee of Transition Network. “I always find the concept of “affordable housing” a really difficult one”, he tells us, “because it implies that the ones that aren’t ‘affordable’ houses must be unaffordable houses. How can you be in the business of an economic system that builds unaffordable houses?”
What are the characteristics of a housing bubble?
When a bubble is a bubble, as opposed to a genuine change in prices because of supply and demand, it really has to do with the availability of credit. It’s a phenomenon of banking systems as much as anything else. After all, if we take Russian oligarchs out of the equation, most people buy a house with a loan, with a mortgage, not with cash. They can’t bid on that house unless the mortgage company has decided they will lend them the money. In the past, and indeed now, whenever you see rapid increases in prices, what’s really at the root of that is an increase in the availability of credit from banks.
Of course the problem with that is that sooner or later bubbles end in a crash, we know that from history, and it’s very destabilising. You might get winners and losers – on the way up it seems everyone’s a winner because everyone’s making money out of their house, and the people who haven’t managed to buy a house yet obviously are left behind.
But then of course when there’s a crash, you might get lots of people who end up in negative equity and are damaged by a debt that’s worth more than their house. It’s just not a great thing to have these bubbles and busts in the housing market. A home is one of the fundamental needs that the economy should be satisfying.
We had the housing bubble in 2008 that burst. At the moment we’re seeing a massive expansion of house building across the UK and elsewhere. How does what’s happening now resemble or differ from what we saw in 2008, do you think?
There was an increase in house building that took place in and up to 2008 as well. It seems that the general price levels that house builders require to earn the sorts of profits that they’re seeking is now pretty high relative to income. In other words, the only way that the government seems to be willing to stimulate house building is to get prices high enough so that private house builders can make enough money by building more houses and selling them.
Now of course there are lots of alternatives to that, not least public funding of the building of council houses. But for seemingly ideological reasons that’s been ruled out. So almost the only way to get more houses built is to create a housing boom to ensure that prices rise fast enough for property speculators and house builders to make lots of money.
That was true both in the run up to 2008 and now. But there are a couple of differences. The two differences I suppose are that planning regulations have been loosened so it’s a bit unpredictable how that will pan out. The second difference is that whereas before the financial crisis banks were able to lend willy nilly almost to anyone by the end, they’re much more constrained by rules and their own more prudent approach about mortgage lending.
It’s much more difficult to get a mortgage. The government is itself pumping the sector up with subsidised mortgages for first time buyers. So the government’s more directly involved in pumping up the house price boom this time as a deliberate strategy, both to get re-elected (one might say cynically), but to prompt this new wave of house building. But the other difference is that compared to previously, there appears to be much less constraint on where that house building is going to happen.
Can the nation afford to buy all of these houses that are supposed to be built?
You have to distinguish between land and buildings pretty crucially. The thing that’s really fluctuating in value of course is the land, not the bricks and mortar. Can we afford to construct buildings to live in? Yes, of course we can. That’s just a question of allocating resources to the things that are important and in one of the wealthiest nations in the world, the idea that we can’t afford to house all our people in a decent level of comfort, if you step back and consider it, it’s a ludicrous idea. So if that’s not happening it’s because the market structures and the economy are set up for it.
But the more tricky part of it is land and can we afford the land element of these prices? When land values rise and fall that’s not creating new wealth. That’s just distributing it from one person to another, from the person buying the land to the people owning the land.
This is an entirely different question about social justice and inequality, and it’s really not sustainable to have a wealthier class of people benefiting from such a system and an ever increasing bunch of people in debt and missing out on that increase in value.
What are the characteristics of what we actually need to build, do you think? Certainly around here, most developments start out saying they’ll build 50, 60% affordable housing and as the process goes on they haggle it down to what seems to be the standard now, 17.5%. All the rest are full market value houses. What are the characteristics of what we actually need to build? How could house building be a boost for local economies without creating a housing bubble?
You’d have to change the whole approach to building new houses. There’s a couple of things: the phrase you just mentioned, “affordable houses”. I always find that a really difficult one, because it implies that the ones that aren’t ‘affordable’ houses must be unaffordable houses. How can you be in the business of an economic system that builds unaffordable houses?
The whole thing does point to a certain deep dysfunction within the housing market. The second point is the idea that it’s a market at all. When you think of markets, you think of something where there’s some functioning price system and people can choose to supply and people can choose to buy. The lovely image in Economics 101 textbooks of the market seller selling apples to describe supply and demand. Houses aren’t like that. It’s not really a market where people have a real choice about what they buy. You have what you can possibly get your hands on if you’re lucky most of the time. So the power is with the people who create the supply.
Leaving this to this private market system is exactly asking for the sort of problem you’ve just described. They’re highly incentivised to make the most money by building a certain kind of house. But that’s not necessarily the kind of houses that we all need at all. That’s what happens if you leave it to this random decentralised market system. It’s not a functioning market. It’s not based around real human needs. And it certainly doesn’t take account of the environmental impacts in anything like a significant enough way.
You need a significantly different system that was based around understanding what people’s needs were and obviously building from much more locally sourced materials and craftspeople.
We’ve already got lots of homes as well which are in a pretty disastrous kind of a state, and the green new deal doesn’t really seem to be working in order to bring those houses up to the kind of levels of energy efficiency that we need to see. How could we do that, do you think?
The Green Deal, rather than the Green New Deal. The Green New Deal was a nef-produced report for transforming the economy. The Green Deal has been extraordinarily unsuccessful really. The idea that people can finance retrofitting of their houses, various retrofitting things could qualify, but they could finance them through borrowing money and then repaying it through the savings on their bills sounds good in theory because the idea is that householders don’t have to borrow a sum of money and then be worried about fixed repayments, they just pay as quickly as they save money.
The flaw in the plan is that the interest rate on the loan is 7%. If people have got a mortgage, the chances are it’s less than 7%. And you can get personal loans at the moment at 4 or 5 %. So why on earth borrow money at 7%? This whole scheme is set up a bit wrong. The interesting thing is to compare that with Germany who, as is so often the case, get this right.
They have funding available for householders to retrofit their houses, a whole house retrofit loan that will cost you an interest rate of around 1% from the German Development Bank. You’re going to do that, aren’t you? A long term loan at 1%, the chances are pretty high that you’re going to be saving more money than the loan repayments and they are currently retrofitting in the region of 1 million homes a year which is something like the pace we need in this country – turning pretty poor housing stock into something which is remotely delivering warm homes to people that don’t emit vast amounts of carbon. Again, this mechanism is hopelessly inadequate.
You did ask me what would make a difference. I think something that is rather out of vogue but I think – I’m trying to remember which council it was – had great success with a high degree of retrofitting but it was as intense effort of almost going door to door, street by street and signing people up to have this work done. You need to make sure that the finance for all of that is done in a way that people can benefit from it whatever their income and wealth position.
Again, it just requires a level of co-ordination by government. It can be done by other people, it can be done by community organisations, I’m thinking Transition Streets is not a million miles away from this, but it needs to be co-ordinated together, street by street and it needs to have the finance available on the right terms to allow this work to happen. The Green Deal is a million miles away from that.
So the dangers for you of trying to find a way out of the crisis caused by a housing bubble by taking the current approach would be what?
There’s a number of components of a housing crisis. One of them is that land has become unaffordable. Not the buildings, it’s the land in many areas of the country. And that’s just a dysfunction of wealth being transferred from one group to another. Land prices are higher than they need to be, and that’s quite a difficult thing to solve. Of course there are lots of proposals around that. At one extreme you could nationalise all the land I suppose, but land value tax is a proposal that is supposed to stop that huge increase in land prices. That’s the way I look at it.
The problem with trying to get houses built by inflating land values is that it’s pumping up another kind of debt bubble. And all debt bubbles burst. So it’s really not a very sustainable approach in the narrow, financial sense of that word to getting more houses built. It’s almost guaranteed that you’ll end up with unaffordable houses really, which isn’t exactly solving the problem we think we’ve got.
One of the other issues that won’t be addressed, it seems, under the current government and we’ll have to wait and see what happens under the next one, is the degree of empty homes. There have been some policy initiatives around this. There are a lot of homes which are empty because they are second homes or owned by overseas buyers who use them occasionally. Or they’re owned by developers who are letting them rot so they’ll get permission to build something else there. We do need to be much more rigorous in not allowing homes to lie empty. So that’s another part of the puzzle, and again not addressed at all by just pumping up a house price boom with subsidised credit.
We have to look at more publicly funded building of houses. Actually, the cheapest funding of all is money that can be borrowed by the government. They can borrow at much cheaper rates than property developers, private landowners, banks or anybody else. So I’d say we need to bring back council houses.
I’m all in favour of the idea of decentralised management. It’s great to have social landlords, housing associations, co-operatives. The finance perhaps needs to be provided at local authority and government level because they are also the important body for delivery of services; so that the schools are in the right places so that people can walk to them and the doctor’s surgeries and all the rest of it. There is a planning function which is held by the local authority.
But it would be great to see more co-operative ownership of land and co-operative ownership of the buildings on the land. But they could be privately owned and if the land is co-operatively owned it gets around some of the frothy boom and bust of land prices and land speculation. So there are some promising signs on this. The garden city concept is one that seems to have captured a little political attention recently, and maybe that will result in examples of co-operatively owned land and housing and that would be a really good thing. But we could do with that happening on a much bigger scale.
This is a slightly abridged version of our conversation. You can hear it in full below:
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